To my knowledge the first to do this was Martin Bashir, who argued that Mitt Romney tells lies, Mormonism teaches that liars go to hell, and therefore Mitt Romney is going to hell ACCORDING TO THE VERY MORMONISM IN WHICH MITT ROMNEY CLAIMS TO BELIEVE. Today Maureen Dowd used the same trick, attacking Romney for destroying documents when, IN POINT OF FACT SUCH BEHAVIOR IS “antithetical to Mormonism, since the Mormon Church loves to save documents, keeping 35 billion images of genealogical information and records on church history in the Granite Mountain Records Vault near Salt Lake City.”

It seems clear to me that Dowd has mortally wounded Romney’s candidacy with this charge, and I won’t be surprised if in the next few days we see Romney give up his bid for the presidency AND get excommunicated for being such a terrible Mormon. If President Obama has any sense he’ll be rehearsing the following interchange for the first debate:

Obama:  Isn’t it true, sir, that your Church stockpiles mounds of genealogical and historical documents  in a mountain vault?

Romney: Yes, it is true.

Obama: Then why, Governor Romney, do you not also keep all of your personal and public documents in a mountain vault? HOW DARE YOU claim to subscribe to the precepts of a Church whose exhaustive mountain-based record-keeping policies vary so greatly from your own?

(President Obama drops mic, exits debate hall. Governor Romney buries head in hands and begins to weep.)

Amazingly, Bashir and Dowd aren’t even the worst examples of frivolous use of this gimmick; that comes to us from Lisa Miller in The Washington Post.

Miller begins by quoting a scripture from the Book of Mormon that states, “Wo unto the rich. Their hearts are upon their treasures,” and then informs us that Mormonism “decries the hoarding of riches.” How does Romney square this particular circle? Well, according to Miller “one possible explanation” – a possible explanation which from that point forward is treated as the only possible explanation – is that “Romney is a bean counter . . . whose search for the right answer blinds him to the nuances of the big picture.”

Miller goes on to assert – without the benefit of any facts or evidence – that Romney is a “literal-minded person” who takes refuge in Church manuals regarding wealth in order to avoid struggling “with his conscience over the consequences of his great wealth.” Miller then spends a few paragraphs citing several random, unconnected quotes from Church leaders to demonstrate that she spent 15 minutes using the search function at LDS.org, and then, without having made an argument to support such a conclusion, concludes that “Romney, it seems, has missed the spirit of his faith – or, as evidenced by his offshore stash, is selectively interpreting it.”

I’m not even sure where to start. Miller’s piece somehow manages to make nearly every single mistake people make when they write or talk about Mormonism. She obviously did very little research on a topic that she clearly does not understand, and then tries to reduce that thorny, complex topic down to a simple equation of, “Mormonism thinks money is bad, Romney has money, Romney is a bad Mormon.” It’s equally clear she spent very little time researching Romney’s finances and is content to make offhand reference to his offshore accounts and wealth without getting into the specifics of how he spends his money, how much money he donates to charity, etc.

I’m not opposed to people trying to figure out how Romney’s Mormonism has influenced who he is and what kind of President he’ll be. It would just be nice if in doing so they tried to understand Mormonism rather than Googling “Mormon scripture document storage wealth” and then dash off a few hundred words neatly tying up a topic that millions of people – including Mitt Romney – wrestle with and pray about. I’ve been Mormon all my life and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and researching the topic of what Mormonism tells us about how we should handle wealth and I still don’t fully understand the topic.

It’s also worth noting just how impossible a position both the Church and Romney are in. According to Businessweek, the Mormon Church is allergic to anything resembling transparency and no single person has a comprehensive picture of what’s going on throughout the organization, but according to Dowd transparency and centralized record-keeping are central to Mormonism. And as for Romney, he’s either a mindless devotee of a cult or he’s a cafeteria Mormon who disregards the central tenets of his faith. Given just how often and much the goal posts get moved on the question of just how Mormon Mitt Romney ought to be, it seems understandable that he would elect to keep his thoughts on the matter to himself.

According to an official church Welfare Services fact sheet, the church gave $1.3 billion in humanitarian aid in more than 178 countries and territories during the 25 years between 1985 and 2010. A fact sheet from the previous year indicates that less than one-third of the sum was monetary assistance, while the rest was in the form of “material assistance.” All in all, if one were to evenly distribute that $1.3 billion over a quarter-century, it would mean that the church gave $52 million annually. A study co-written by Cragun and recently published in Free Inquiry estimates that the Mormon Church donates only about 0.7 percent of its annual income to charity; the United Methodist Church gives about 29 percent.

These conclusions are both factually untrue and quite unfair, so we figured we should circle back and deal with this problematic paragraph, with three basic points:

First: The Facts Are Wrong.  Businessweek claims to know what percent of the LDS Church’s annual financial income is donated to charitable causes.  It does not.  The conclusion that charitable giving amounts to only .7 percent of annual income appears to be drawn from this published Fact Sheet detailing some parts of the Church’s charitable work.  But, as Kaimi Wenger at Times & Seasons has pointed out, the Fact Sheet summarizes only international humanitarian relief provided by the Church, amounting to approximately $1.4 Billion between 1985 and 2011.  It does not include all of the charitable work the LDS Church does domestically, nor all of the welfare assistance it provides to the poor (as opposed to humanitarian aid for disaster- or crisis-stricken areas) worldwide.  I have not seen any reliable estimations of the amounts donated for such causes, but they are immense.  Every one of the LDS Church’s tens of thousands of units has a welfare program, which provides free financial assistance to church members in need, as well as, in some cases, non-members.  This relief is certainly in the multiple millions of dollars.  Beyond that, the Church has innumerable other charitable projects going on, which are not included in the Fact Sheet numbers.  The Church supports thousands of scholarships for needy students; has set up a massive program to provide educational opportunities for poorer members (over 40,000 loans disbursed in its first eight years); and runs a huge social services program, providing counseling, adoption services, and addiction recovery assistance in many countries, all (apparently) without any chance of profit.  The Church also gives quietly to all sorts of worthy projects.  Just a tiny sampling of these less-publicized contributions: This report of the Utah Food Bank shows the LDS Church as a Platinum level donor, requiring a donation of at least $2.5 million (at 4).  The same report shows donations of 500,000+ pounds of food, and a separate entry for all of the food collected by LDS branches and wards (at 10).  This report, from the Road Home, a Salt Lake City homeless shelter, shows the Church at the top of the list of donors, with at least $100,000 donated (probably much more) (at 19).  The Salt Lake Tribune recently reported that the LDS Church will be donating $4 million to the University of Utah, free and clear, toward the construction of a new building for its law school.

This tiny handful of private reports, all from the last couple of years, suggests a wide and varied stream of donations flowing from the LDS Church to many quite different causes.  It also highlights, once more, the fundamental problem with purporting to know details of the finances of a large private institution.  Businessweek actually has no idea how much money the LDS Church gives to charity.  It also has no idea how much money comes in the door either (since its figures of income are admittedly based on two third-party estimates, whose veracity cannot be verified, which vary substantially).  Thus, both the numerator and the denominator of its “0.7%” figure are totally without reliable basis.  A proposed rule for journalists: If you don’t have real, direct evidence for a significant claim, don’t print the claim.

Second: The Comparison Is Misleading.  I’ve seen several people point to the comparison to the United Methodist Church as a damning fact.  How can the LDS Church claim to be focused on charity when it gives less than a percent of its income to charity, where the Methodists give nearly a third?  First, keep in mind that the numbers are wrong, as set forth above.  But second, this is a classic case of mistaking apples for oranges.  The United Methodist Church operates under a very decentralized structure, broken into several layers of ecclesiastical bodies.  According to its website, donations made to one’s congregation largely remain in the person’s congregation, rather than being sent directly to the central church organization.  Thus, when Businessweek alleges that 29% percent of the Methodist Church’s receipts go to charity, it means 29% of receipts that make their way to the national governing body, which is a fraction of overall receipts given to Church units.  The LDS Church, by contrast, is entirely centralized.  When one pays tithing in the LDS Church, the money goes to the central church, with none of the money remaining locally (this is not the case for fast offerings, a monthly charitable contribution which sometimes remains in the local sphere).  Thus, it stands to reason that the LDS Church’s receipts will be vastly larger than those of the Methodist Church, whose central monetary body receives donations largely for the purpose of distributing them for charitable causes.  The LDS Church, on the other hand, has enormous financial burdens, since it administers and funds the entirety of the Church’s mission worldwide.  A huge amount of the receipts given to local Methodist congregations must be used internally, to build and maintain buildings, pay the ministry, and otherwise carry out the Church’s mission.  None of those internal expenses were factored into the sloppy claim that the Methodist Church gives away 27% of its income to charity.  In fact, the gross receipts provided to all levels of the Methodist Church must be much, much higher than the $214 million number Businessweek relies on, which would of course bring down the percentage of total income given to charity significantly.  Another way of looking at it, as Raymond Takashi Swenson points out, is to compare giving per/capita membership.  By Swenson’s calculations (at comment 98 here) (which adopt the very low Businessweek estimation of LDS charitable giving) the LDS Church donates about $8.67 per member per year to charitable causes, compared to $7.69 for the Methodists.  When one understands the difference between the LDS Church as a whole, and the governing financial organization at the top of the United Methodist Church, one quickly realizes that the comparison published by Businessweek is deeply flawed and unfair.

Third: The Conclusion Misses the Point.  If you and I both make $1 million, and you donate $500,000, and I donate $5,000, it is easy to determine which of us is more charitable.  All the rest of my money will be spent on me, so it’s obvious I’m being more selfish than you, and this would be proper grounds for criticism.  When two churches spend dissimilar amounts on humanitarian aid, the analysis is completely different.  That’s because churches don’t typically spend their non-charitable funds on “selfish” purposes.  The LDS Church is not some wealthy individual buying ski boats and jetting to St. Lucia, while stiffing the local homeless.  The money the LDS Church does not spend on humanitarian purposes is being spent on other causes it believes are of equal or greater value to the world.  As has been noted widely, the Church builds and maintains many thousands of buildings to host its members and create stable, holy places to preach the gospel.  The Church trains, equips, supports, and houses tens of thousands of missionaries, some of whom are supported by their parents, but the majority of whom are not.  These missionaries require maintenance of huge fleets of cars, hundreds of offices, and tens of thousands of flights each year.  The Church publishes books, magazines, curriculum and administration manuals, operates several universities (all at a loss), and manages myriad other widespread and wide-ranging aspects of a massive, rapidly growing global operation–almost none of which produces a cent of revenue.  Thus, even if the LDS Church gave very little to traditional charitable causes, that would not be evidence of selfishness or apathy.  It might mean that the Church’s fights against evil, secularism, and sin are higher priorities than the fight against hunger and disease.  It’s a debatable position, but quite defensible.

The misunderstanding regarding the LDS Church’s charitable activity in the world can be clarified by considering the church’s definition of charity.  While many in the world define charity as something similar to “alms,” the LDS Church takes a much broader view.  The Book of Mormon teaches that “charity is the pure love of Christ.”  The LDS Church believes that its unique mission is to spread its testimony of Christ, and his love for all people, to all the inhabitants of the earth.  While its focus on providing material relief to those in need is admirable, its priority is on advancing the spiritual work of Jesus Christ in the world.  To take potshots at a worldwide religion for spending more of its money preaching the gospel than feeding the hungry is to badly misunderstand the purpose of religion, and the message of Christ.

Image: Welfare Square, a large food-packaging facility operated by the LDS Church for charitable purposes

Winter’s story can be boiled down to two simple questions that are never explicitly asked but nonetheless drive the entire piece: Why does a religion need money? Didn’t Jesus say bad things about money? That’s the essence of the cover gracing this particular issue of the magazine (discussed here), and that’s the essence of the story. They’re interesting questions, and they arise from the debate regarding how to apply Christ’s teachings on money in the modern world as well as thousands of years of financial fraud and abuse by religions organizations and figures. These are thorny, complex issues. Unfortunately, they tend to get reduced down to something along the lines of, “Religion good, money bad, religion with money real bad.”

Let’s take a look at this line of thinking, and begin with a simple statement of fact: In order to accomplish their mission, churches have to pay for things just like businesses and governments do, and they have to pay for them with money. So, if you accept the idea of organized religion, you must also accept the necessity of churches collecting money from their members – who else will give it to them? – and spending that money on the things churches need to function as churches. We’re left, then, with questions of degree and details: How much should a church collect from its members? How much should be donated to charity? Should a church utilize for-profit enterprises to help fund its mission?

Over the course of nearly 200 years, the LDS Church has developed its own answers to these questions. The Church teaches that tithing is a commandment from God that enables the Church to provide the temporal ingredients (buildings, cars, flights) for spiritual activities (temple work, missionary work, church services) while also entitling Church members to the blessings of heaven for their sacrifice and faith. The Church has also determined that it needs to make the best use of its financial resources in order to ensure that it will enjoy financial independence and ability to fund its activities well into the future. This approach makes uses of both typical non-profit activities as well as some for-profit ones.

That’s the Church’s take on those difficult issues; there are many other perspectives, great swarms of which have been unleashed on humanity in the wake of the Businessweek article. Winter has the unenviable task of explicating a topic about which she frequently admits almost nothing is known.  One hates to take advantage of her candor, but it’s worth pointing out again: we’re talking about something that no one really knows anything about, including, admittedly, the author of the piece.  Thus, the world has been treated to a lengthy report on the wealth of a church containing several estimates of that wealth offered by sources without any direct knowledge, all contradicted by the church itself, all while the reporter admits that even those within the Church have no reliable estimation of the extent of that wealth.

Elsewhere, a source (himself an excommunicated former member) assumes authoritatively that executives in church-owned businesses likely earn market-based salaries while failing to provide evidence of his claims while our reporter writes that a Hawaiian tourist attraction appears lucrative, based on her knowledge of ticket prices but not expenditures or scholarships.  One of Winter’s main sources, Keith McMullin, “insists that not one penny of tithing goes to the church’s for-profit endeavors,” but, Winter adds, without any contradicting evidence, “it’s impossible for church members to know for sure.”  An LDS member ominously says of the church’s tithing funds “[t]he money may be perfectly administered for all we know. . . but we don’t know.”  This might have been a very good tagline for the entire article: “LDS Money: We Just Don’t Know.” And when you don’t have good information, you get things wrong.

The defense to this approach is obvious: We don’t know because the Church won’t tell us!  The Church’s lack of transparency is one of Businessweek’s pervasive themes, and one that seems to strike a deep chord with many Church critics.  But the call for transparency is not an argument- it’s a reality which the article takes for granted is undesirable and ought to be changed. Nowhere in the Businessweek article (or in other posts and conversations we’ve seen) does anyone offer any compelling rationale for transparency in the finances of a privately controlled religious organization.  Over and over in Winter’s piece, the notion that the Church is private about its financial matters comes up creepily, without ever a single quotation or remark articulating why transparency really is a must for the Church.  It is true that the Church is private about its finances.  That makes people uncomfortable.  Why?  Well, because most large organizations with a lot of money are publicly held or outright public institutions, so we get to see behind the curtain. When a private institution has money and interests, we want to know what they are, and not knowing reeeally bugs us!

Those complaining about the lack of transparency fall into two camps: (1) Those outside the Church, who have never contributed to it, and (2) those within the Church, who give their money voluntarily in the belief that they give it to an organization appointed and inspired by God.  To the first group, the Church owes nothing at all.  We have yet to hear any legitimate reason an outsider might have for wanting to see the Church’s financial statements, outside of basic curiosity. Calls for transparency from the second group are also problematic.  One generally contributes to the Church because she feels the organization is divine.  The contribution implies trust that the organization has a higher purpose for the money than the donor.  That the donor should then demand accountability from the divine entity presents a great paradox.  Either you believe the Church is led by prophets, and therefore trust them, or you don’t, and you don’t give your money.  If a person thinks he can do better with his money, he has not understood the purpose of tithing in the first place, and may want to opt out.

This is not to say that the Church doesn’t control its finances carefully. There are actually abundant financial controls set up to assure that tithing funds are handled correctly.  The Church views such funds as a sacred trust, and requires semi-annual audits of each unit, with multiple accounting controls imposed on all who handle money, and the threat of excommunication for any who might exploit their position to siphon any funds.  The call for transparency might gain a whiff of credibility if there had been one single financial scandal in the last century of the Church’s history (and no, we don’t buy that there could be lots of scandals that the Church just covers up – it’s way too big to keep many secrets like that).  But there hasn’t.  Critics of the Church’s financial operations bear the burden of proof to show why the status quo doesn’t work.

Although no one has offered a strong reason for the Church to publicly disclose all of its financial dealings, the Businessweek story presents a compelling reason not to.  This article provides proof that any nugget of information about how the Church spends its money will be dissected, criticized, and, worst of all, amplified until it overshadows the real, spiritual mission of the Church, which is to spread the gospel across the world. This was the gist of the Church’s response to Winter’s article: the money is a means to an end– the end of teaching the gospel and helping people to live it.

Now, some would argue that the money is actually the end in itself; that argument, in our view, only makes sense if there’s someone who is benefiting personally from that money. Because the Church isn’t transparent with its finances, nobody can prove conclusively whether someone is benefiting or not. That said, we personally have witnessed quite a bit of of anecdotal evidence that points to the fact that that nobody is getting rich from the Church. The Church is a pretty small world. We know or know people who know the families of several of the General Authorities of the Church. (We’re not anything special; the Church is a small world, and lots of Mormons, especially in Utah, know General Authorities or their families.) We’ve seen their homes and the cars they drive. We know several others who work for the Church as paid employees. None of these people – found at all levels of the organization, including the very top – is rich. General Authorities live comfortable, upper middle class lifestyles. We’d guess they make substantially less than the top employees of comparable non-profit organizations like the Boy Scouts or the Red Cross, and they indubitably make far, far less than most of them were making in the careers they had prior to being called to the ministry. The Church employees we know make less than they would in comparable jobs in the for-profit sector. If these people are in it for the money, they’re doing it wrong.

Speed Round:

• On spending (supposedly) $2B on City Creek Mall: Salt Lake is the home of the LDS Church. It needs Salt Lake to be a nice place that people want to visit. Again, temporal means to a spiritual end.

• Michal Quinn says, “It’s as spiritual to give alms to the poor, as the old phrase goes in the Biblical sense, as it is to make a million dollars.”  Wrong.  Just wrong. Quinn needs to back that statement up with enough evidence to contradict everything in the Bible, Book of Mormon, and everything LDS leaders teach twice a year at General Conference.

• “The church’s “General Authorities” — of which there are more than 100 — consist of the First Presidency, the Presiding Bishopric, the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, and at least two other groups, the so-called Quorums of Seventy.” Um, use of “so-called” here seems a little out of place in this so-called article by a so-called writer in a so-called magazine.

• “In some cases, individual General Authorities augment their salaries by serving as board members of the church’s for-profit companies.” Examples? To the best of our knowledge, this practice was ended and no longer occurs.

• “The Mormon belief in the spiritual value of financial success goes back to 1830, when the religion’s founder, Joseph Smith, announced to his followers that God had told him the following: ‘Verily I say unto you, that all things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal.’” On this matter we’ll refer you to this piece by Alan Hurst,who knocks it out of the park.

• “Until the 1990s, wards — the Mormon equivalent of parishes — kept some donated member money locally to distribute for aid and activities as they saw fit. Today, all money is wired directly to Salt Lake City.” This is misleading. Local leaders still have a great deal of discretion on how to spend their funds. Bishops distributed millions of dollars in aid to local members without Church HQ ever being involved.

Sullivan says, “Mormonism, in contrast, is always seeking expansion, converts and new missions and if these new markets for their religion reject some aspects of it, the doctrines are changed in a process of continued revelation. Hence the evaporation of the racial doctrines as the LDS church was expanding into South America and Africa.”

I can understand why some would view lifting the ban preventing males of African descent from holding the priesthood as a cynical ploy to gain converts. I don’t see it like that, of course, but I get why others would.

That said, it’s important to consider this point: if the LDS Church were in the business of optimizing its beliefs and practices for the purpose of gaining converts, it would look much, much different than it does today. If were just interested in converts and their money, why would the bar be so high to join and stay? Why would we hold to difficult and controversial practices and ideas like, for example, the Word of Wisdom?

I’ve been a missionary. Getting people to give up smoking and drinking alcohol and coffee is a tough, tough, tough sell. And it would be relatively easy to give it up, as the World of Wisdom isn’t viewed as an eternal principle. So if the guys running things in SLC wanted more people, why not get rid of all the massive barriers to entry?

Sullivan begins by saying that we were “offended” by his raising the question of “Mormonism’s cultish qualities.”  Let us be clear: we’re not offended. (It takes a lot more than that.) Sullivan hasn’t hurt our feelings; he has, rather, committed some errors in logic that we’re seeking to correct. Claiming that someone is offended is an easy way of discounting their arguments as subjective and emotional. We’re not seeking an apology from Sullivan for offending us; we’re hoping to see him use better logic and information in his frequent discussion of Mormonism.

Sullivan concludes his piece by proclaiming that he “won’t be intimidated” by accusation of ‘prejudice’ into not exploring aspects of Mormon doctrine and practice when debating a presidential candidate.” This is an old politician’s trick: when your opponent accuses you of negative behavior (in our case, of using sloppy logic and imprecise terms), you simply act like your opponent was accusing you of behavior that everyone agrees is positive and then refuse to apologize for that positive behavior. We are not in any way seeking to intimidate Sullivan or anyone else from exploring Mormonism or its legitimate impact on Governor Romney. We are, rather, seeking to promote fairness, accuracy, and logical consistency as they explore these topics. It saddens us to say as longtime readers and fans of Sullivan that his handling of the matter has, in our view, been disappointingly subjective and unfair. We can’t be sure just why Sullivan approaches the discussion of Mormonism with a negative bias, but thus far his writing on the matter has been decidedly one-sided and ill-informed.

More to the substance: Sullivan originally said Mormonism is a cult because it meets his own criteria for cultishness.  We responded that it’s easy to draw up any “criteria” to make a religion look cultish.  He now pivots to basically admitting we’re right.  Case in point: he argues that the Catholic Church actually is cultish, or at least has some cultish aspects to it.  But our point was not that the Catholic Church is a cult.  Quite the opposite, we feel a majority of Americans would agree that the Catholic Church is not at all a cult.  Regardless, once again Sullivan’s characterization reveals the sloppiness of the word (and any attempt to apply it fairly).  That is, for some reason, the Catholic Church displays cultish tendencies, but is not a cult, whereas the Mormon Church has other allegedly cultish tendencies, and probably is (in Sullivan’s view) a cult.  Indeed, in Sullivan’s telling, “there are cultish aspects to all religions.”

Now we’ve lost all connection to any useful concept.  If all religions suffer from cultishness, but not all are cults, is it a question of which ones are pious enough to overcome their cultishness?  Is cultishness just a sliding scale?  Or is it just all in the eye of the beholder?  Or is “cult” just synonymous with religion?  When calling Mormonism a cult, is Sullivan really just saying that it operates like hundreds of other religions, which do not typically privilege transparency and democracy over divine authority?  Does anyone have any idea what is meant by this word, which dissolves into nothingness the moment you pick it up?

Sullivan’s criteria for identifying cults are simply suspect.  He does not dispute that they have been pre-selected for specific treatment of Mormonism.  They are certainly over-inclusive (Peter collected tithing effectively; the Federal Reserve is an “authoritarian structure with no external accountability”) and under-inclusive (they do not appear to encompass the Branch Davidians or the Mansons).  In short, they’re not helpful.  Sullivan’s definitions don’t get you anywhere, except where you started, which is: Andrew Sullivan looks at Mormonism and sees a cult.

But if other religions can escape the cult label despite having some clear cultish tendencies, based on how much good they contain, Mormons should be given the same chance, right?  Wouldn’t it be impossible for Mormonism to be a cult if Mormons show signs of great social engagement and psychological health and other pro-society attributes?  How about this new academic study of volunteerism and charitable giving by University of Pennsylvania researchers, which found that “members of the [LDS Church] are the most prosocial members of American society.  Regardless of where they live, they are very generous with their time and money.”  According to the study, the average Mormon gives about 35 hours per month in volunteering, compared to 4 hours a month for other average Americans.  Is that level of service and charitable donations indicative of a cult?  What about this University of North Carolina study showing that Mormon teens cope with the challenges of adolescence better than any other religious group.  According to one UNC researcher, “[a]cross almost every category we looked at, there was a clear pattern: Mormons were first.”  There’s more: Utah (which still has a majority Mormon population) has the lowest rate of out-of-wedlock births, and as Ross Douthat notes, one of the lowest divorce rates, and a very low instance of teen pregnancy.  How can a church with some of the most sociable, charitable, well-adjusted, and demographically successful people in America be a cult?    Isn’t such a picture fundamentally inconsistent with the basic idea of what a cult is?

In the end, Sullivan can’t have it both ways.  You can’t say that most religions, despite cultish aspects, are not actually cults because of the good in them, while also ignoring the good in Mormonism on the way to condemning it as a cult.  What would be much more fair is to come up with one clear definition of the word (not pre-loaded with a single group in mind) and to see how it applies equally across all religions.  Also, if you are not a specialist in this area, you should probably select the definition that the vast majority of people already hold to.  That is, call something a cult if it is a marginal group of religious zealots who use psychological manipulation to gain and control adherents, usually in ways fundamentally out of harmony with mainstream society.

The rest of Sullivan’s article is just a repetitive list of potshots.  Sullivan refers to the Book of Mormon as “a mysterious new text” without explaining why its being new (at least relative to the Bible) is bad. He also authoritatively settles the matter of the historicity of the Book of Mormon, informing us that it was “created by what was quite obviously a scam operation.” This is perhaps the most ridiculous part of Sullivan’s piece. The debate regarding the authorship of the Book of Mormon has raged for nearly two hundred years. Professional and amateur academics have dedicated barrels of ink and reams of paper to the issue. There are many well-educated Mormon scholars well-versed in this debate who believe in the ancient origin of the Book of Mormon. Sullivan has made the mistake of many ill-informed observers, of assuming that this question lies outside the field of questions on which reasonable minds may disagree.

Regarding “extreme social pressure against apostasy,” this does apply somewhat to Mormonism, though it is an exaggeration to call it extreme.  In this Mormons are not unlike any other social group or institution with high cohesion. Parents and siblings and friends want their loved ones to see the value in the things they value; this is true of Steelers fans, AFL-CIO members, and Evangelical Christians. The key question is: are they allowed to leave?  The answer is yes.  What are the consequences when they do?  In some unfortunate cases, they are ostracized. There is no doctrinal or institutional support for such behavior.  Further, there is no threat of harm or injury, no extortion or coercion related to such pressure, as you might expect in a cult.  The worst that can happen when you leave the Mormon faith is that some of your friends and family members might take it badly and marginalize you.  While such instances are very unfortunate, it is hard to see how they make the Church a sinister place.  We happen to know many former Mormons who continue to live and work and socialize and thrive in Salt Lake City without any visible consequences of their de-conversion.

A final point.  During the great debate about Jeremiah Wright, Andrew Sullivan called Martin Marty as a character witness on the subject, noting that “there are few more distinguished, principled or decent public figures.”  The clear implication of Sullivan’s effusive praise was that Marty’s conclusions on matters of religion are to be viewed as authoritative.  Taking this position seriously, we call Martin Marty as a character witness on the issue of Mormonism.  Hopefully his trustworthy voice on this issue will persuade those minds that the Church itself can’t seem to reach.

Mr. Sullivan, ball’s in your court.  Tell us why all those religions with cultish qualities aren’t cults, but Mormonism is.  And how all those demonstrably good qualities in the Mormon faith and people can be reconciled with a definition of “cult” that anyone would recognize.  And why Martin Marty could be trusted on the strength of his bona fides alone in the case of Jeremiah Wright, and not in the case of Mormons.

Photo: LDS Conference Center in Salt Lake City, Utah

Do you guys get it? It’s funny because neither Jesus nor His apostles would ever deign to instruct the members of Jesus’ Church on matters related to financial or temporal affairs. Jesus can’t possibly have an opinion regarding anything financial, temporal or  even modern. He can only have opinions on old time-y things like stoning people. And we know for certain He would never weigh in on anything so grubby and pedestrian as taxes.

And some people say media folks don’t understand religion! Also, good job, whoever chose that cover, for (unfairly) undercutting the pretense of the authors objectivity.

That last line is a play on the extensive media coverage that followed an unusual event last week.  Somewhere between 120 and 150 people gathered in Salt Lake to publicly renounce their membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  They wrote letters to the church, signed a “declaration of independence,” hiked a local hilltop that holds some historical significance for the church, and there exchanged hugs and shouted out with whoops of freedom.

Judging by the extent of the media coverage of this event, at least half of those 150 people were reporters.  But despite the variety of media outlets who covered the story, they seem to have collaborated on the headline: “Mormon Group Quits LDS Church en masse,” wrote the Salt Lake Tribune.  “Mormons Quit Church in Mass Resignation,” shouted Reuters.  And so on.

While it is surely true that this sort of thing is uncommon, and therefore notable, it is also a bit of a head-scratcher that so many publications found it so interesting, and characterized it as a mass event.  What other gatherings are described as mass events?  A 150 person flashmob?  Surely not.  150 person little league crowd?  We know that 150 people quietly attending an LDS meetinghouse on a Sunday morning certainly is not a “mass” event.

While the stories on this publicity event were factually accurate, they add to a rising mis-impression that has begun to creep up among critics of the LDS Church, which is that the church is hemorrhaging members, and is on a track to fold up in a few years in light of all of the defections.  A related argument I hear from my LDS-averse friends is that the Church’s official membership numbers are wildly inflated as a means of cynically exaggerating the Church’s reach.

There is no evidence for these claims.  Yes, it is true that the LDS Church, like all modern religions, sees people leaving its ranks, possibly more now than in the past (such losses are not net losses, as they are offset by new growth).  But has the rate of defection reached any kind of critical tipping point that threatens the viability of the Church?  Certainly not.  A few good data points are useful here.  First, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life conducted a massive survey in 2007 in which 35,000 respondents self-reported their religious affiliation.  The survey found that 1.7% of Americans identify themselves as Mormons.  Based on a population of 301 million that year, this works out to about  5,117,000 American Mormons (a very small fraction of that total would belong to Mormon splinter groups, not the LDS Church).  While the number of self-identifying American Mormons falls below the 6 million or so the Church claims, it is not outrageously so.  This number demonstrates that the Church continues to believe that some people are Mormons who may have moved on, but rebuts the idea that there is a major inflation of the numbers going on.  A second useful data point is the new estimation by Business Week* that the LDS Church takes in approximately 8 billion per year in tithing receipts.  This number is the product of major estimation and guesswork, and should not be relied upon for any purpose requiring precision.  But as a basic approximation of the Church’s support base, it is impressive.  It means that there are many, many faithful Latter-day Saints out there, still going to meetings and sending support to the Church.  However one measures mass apostasy, self-reports of millions and millions of American members, and monetary donations in the many billions, do not suggest an anemic church about to collapse.

Speaking more anecdotally, the defections of the people documented in the recent reports also do not presage any great calamity for the LDS Church.  Many of the people described in the media stories have been out of the Church for a very long time, meaning that their participation in the resignation now was solely symbolic.  Others indicated that their faith had been so weak all along that a resignation was no surprise.  One woman told a reporter that she decided to leave upon determining that the timeline of events in the Book of Mormon is hard to reconcile.  Someone else said they left the church after hearing that church leaders were taken in by a set of forged historical documents some 30 years ago.  That is, people who had previously given their entire lives to the LDS Church found a few minor (and fully explainable) facts online and just had to walk away.   The Church laments the withdrawal of any of its members.  These defections are sad to see, where reconciliation might have been possible.  But there is little anyone can do about faith so shallow– a lifelong religious commitment that can be destroyed by a handful of questionable, one-sided facts.  Members of the LDS faith are always encouraged to deepen their spiritual knowledge, to explore their doctrine and scriptures, and find stronger spiritual confirmations of their faith.  The fact that some have chosen not to do so should not be construed as some massive epidemic confronting the Church.

Despite last week’s defection event, the number of attendees in my little meetinghouse last Sunday did not decline.  Unfortunately, there were no breathless reporters sitting in to record that mass event.

Photo via Salt Lake Tribune

*We’ll have more in response to that article in the future.

Janie B. Cheaney (who, it must be said, has a perfect name for a well-intentioned but mischievous heroine of a children’s book) wrote an op-ed in World Magazine about how Evangelical Christians ought to feel about a Mormon presidential candidate.

Ms. Cheaney mentions a conversation with a fellow Evangelical wherein the friend expressed concern over voting for Mitt Romney because she felt a President Romney may lend legitimacy to Mormonism and may also be controlled by the leaders of the LDS Church. Ms. Cheaney wisely responds that she believes such concerns are unfounded, arguing that, “A religion that’s already the fourth-largest in the United States, and the fastest-growing, doesn’t lack legitimacy . . and the two identities (Mormon and American) don’t necessarily clash. Mormonism is as American as the Second Great Awakening.”

Ms. Cheaney is not surprisingly unconvinced by the truth claims and doctrines of Mormonism, labeling Joseph Smith’s account of the founding of the church as “fanciful.”  However, unlike many others who are unable to separate the religious from the political, she is able to understand the positive impact Mormonism has on the life of its adherents and the contributions of those adherents to America, stating, “As a group, Mormons outwork and outplay-by-the-rules just about every other American demographic, and their church has amassed a fortune, as have many of its adherents. Mitt Romney is an exemplary Mormon, which does not interfere with being an exemplary American.”

After delving into her disagreement with the Mormon conception of Christ, Ms. Cheaney concludes that, “Mormonism is not at odds with America; only in America could such a faith spring up and prosper. A Mormon president is no political threat. The Mormon candidate is from all appearances a decent family man, relatively conservative, with a record that may raise some eyebrows but doesn’t strike fear in my heart. I will pray for God to grant him wisdom, and salvation, and be grateful: We could do worse.”

In other words, Ms. Cheaney has done what so few others have been able to: disagree with Mitt Romney’s Mormonism while recognizing that such religious differences don’t represent a threat to people who aren’t Mormon or the country Romney seeks to lead.